The expansion of
globalising cities into global city-regions poses key challenges for rethinking
city-region governance. Often reliant on inadequate urban-economic
infrastructure and fragmented urban-regional planning and governance arrangements,
these newly emerging metropolitan spaces have generated impassioned debate
about more ‘appropriate’, widely understood to mean more flexible, networked
and smart, forms of planning and governance. At the same time, new expressions of territorial cooperation and
conflict have surfaced around issues relating to economic
restructuring and increased competitiveness, infrastructure development, the
collective provision of services, and governmentalised remappings of state
space. Our
contention is that the challenge of city-region governance is more pressing today
than ever before.

Some ten years on from Allen Scott’s original treatise on the rise of
city-regions in globalisation (Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory,
Policy), what we hope to achieve with this Special Issue is a furthering of
our understanding of the main governance tasks facing metropolitan regions. In the introductory paper, Governing the new metropolis, we identify four central tenets of the
metropolitan region/governance debate and discuss their relevance for future
research on city-regions: (1) periodisation and trajectories, (2) democracy and
accountability, (3) form and function, and (4) fragility and mobilisation. These,
we argue, pose key challenges for rethinking city-region governance within the
emerging new metropolitan paradigm. Drawing on situated knowledge from
research conducted on Amazonia, Canada, India, Ireland, The Netherlands, United
Kingdom and the United States, each theme
is then unpacked and developed across 11papers. Exploring some of the main contentions and as yet unanswered questions in
the metropolitan
region/governance debate, each contribution examines how current and near-future research can proffer new
insights into, and bring about advances to, understanding city-regions and
city-region governance.

It is our hope that the lines
of argument developed in this issue will prove useful for scholars researching globalising
cities and city-regions;
provide an important staging post for considering the challenges of metropolitan
governance; and ultimately contribute
to a healthy programme of city-region
research for the next decade. By bringing together both familiar
and emerging voices the issue provides an up-to-date account of the different
perspectives being developed to illicit fresh understandings of city-region
governance. In adopting this approach we actively encourage others to join us in
taking forward this research agenda, by responding directly to the arguments proposed
in this issue and offering their own insights into the challenges for rethinking city-region governance. For
us this is an innovative and productive area of research, and we look forward
to seeing what response the issue generates.

About

Urban Studies is the leading interdisciplinary journal for critical urban research and issues. Since it was first published in 1964 to provide an international forum for research into the fields of urban and regional studies, the journal has expanded to encompass the increasing range of disciplines and approaches that have been brought to bear on urban and regional issues